Should future cartoons depicting God replace the bearded old man with a portrait of Craig Venter?

Probably not yet, though there definitely seems to be a lot of people who think he's messing with things he shouldn't be and there was a blogasm over the weekend regarding his most recent publication in science.

So, lets take a step back for those that are unaware what the big deal is.  Dr. Craig Venter was the pioneer of sequencing the Human genome and, since that task is complete, has moved on to the creation of artificial life.  Last week, Dr. Venter published his most recent advances toward this goal, which was to replace the genome of a bacterium with one that his company made artificially in the lab.  In effect, he "rebooted" a bacteria with a new operating system from another organism, opening the door to potentially design organisms for specific purposes.

Now, I'm sure most people can see the ethical dilemna of this advance.  It raises many of the same questions that have been around for decades regarding the use of standard molecular biology techniques...namely, should we (we being humans) be manipulating the basic building blocks of life (aka DNA)...or as many oponents of molecular biology call it...playing god.  I don't want to rehash this debate as its going on all over the internet at the moment and it would not be hard to find such a conversation if you are interested.  I would rather discuss the scientific implications of this advance under the pretense that there is no ethical debate (and for full disclosure, I do not have many hang ups over the ethical nature of this advance).

That being said, what does this advance do for every day Joe public.  At the moment, not really anything...just as the discovery of the LASER didn't see real world applications for years after its invention.  What it does do, is show proof of principle that genomic information can be engineered in the lab and introduced into bacteria.  This is a fairly large step forward from where the technology currently stands, where we can introduce peices of DNA into bacteria, but all of which are dependent on the bacterial DNA as well.  To me this is the major point, Dr. Venter has found a way to replace the entire bacterial genome with that of one made in the lab. 

So how long will it be before we see bacteria engineered for a specific purpose (such as turning carbon dioxide into some form of usuable fuel, for example)?  not clear, but I'm guessing we are several years  away(atleast a decade) at best.  How far are we from taking this one step further and replacing a human cell's DNA with DNA made in a lab....a really really really long way away.  While it may be possible at some point in the future, the size of the human genome is thousands-fold larger than that the average bacteria (its like going from the diameter of shooting marble to the length of a football field).  That doesn't mean that people won't start trying, but that is another can of worms for another time.